


keep you forever

by ottermo



Series: out of the cave [5]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Nobody cries in this fic can you believe, it’s just low stakes softness all round
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 16:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21256583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ottermo/pseuds/ottermo
Summary: In which Robin is fine. No, really, she actuallyisfine, and she completely didn’t mean to make anybody panic.But it’s kind of nice that he did.





	keep you forever

**Author's Note:**

> Just a bit of soft silliness that kept forcing its way into my thoughts all day, so I had to write some of it down. Again with the autobiography - even more thinly-veiled than usual. I just love these two a lot.

When eleven o’ clock comes and goes without a single sign that her mother’s friends will shut up or go home, Robin decides that enough is enough, pulls on a pair of cords and a jacket over her night shirt, and calls Steve (because, like, supposedly he has a life and stuff so she can’t always expect that he’ll be in. He is, though). 

“Hello?” 

His voice is husky in a way that sounds suspiciously like she’s woken him up. “Sorry, were you asleep?” 

“Robin?”

“Oh. Yeah, it’s me. Is it cool if I come over?” 

“Of course.” The phone is jostled somehow, a few thumping noises come down the line. “Are you okay? Do you need me to come and get you?”

“No, I was just checking you were in.” A new round of cackles rings through the too-thin walls and she rolls her eyes. “I can’t be in my house right now. See you in a few.”

She hangs up, fetches her sneakers, and once downstairs, wonders seriously if she can take her mom’s car. She’s got a license now, just not her own wheels, and her mom is usually kind of okay with Robin taking the car if she’s not using it herself (which, considering how drunk she and her cronies are right now, she definitely won’t be). But a handful of said cronies have parked their cars criss-cross over the drive, and maybe someone with experience and amazing spatial awareness could get her mother’s out, but Robin is not that someone, so she lugs her bike out of the lean-to instead, and makes swiftly for Steve’s. 

It only takes ten minutes to get there by bike, which is not to say that Robin lives in the nicer part of town, but that she’s fast and knows all the short-cuts. She could probably bike to Steve’s blindfolded by this point. She wouldn’t, but she could. 

She arrives at the foot of the Harrington driveway just before twenty past eleven, and doesn’t even get to knock at the door before Steve has flung it open, a wild look in his eyes. 

“Hi,” she says, disconcerted, and her confusion is compounded by him swooping her into a hug, there on the doorstep. 

“What’s going on?” he asks, and she could ask him the same question. “I was so worried.” 

“Nothing’s— Oh,” Robin replays their phonecall from his perspective, and realises she might have left out some pertinent details. “Sorry. No, there’s nothing wrong. My mom had book club at our place, and they started reading sections of DH Lawrence out to each other around nine and they’re still at it.”

“DH who?”

“Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”

Steve blinks. “That’s definitely not what you said before.”

“I know, dummy. That’s the name of the book. It came out in the twenties and they’re deciding how it compares to the stuff that gets banned now. Or they were. Now they’re just taking shots every time something _ ripples_. It’s gross. Are we going to stand here all night?”

Steve steps back to let them both in the house, and shuts the door behind them. 

“Sorry I woke you up,” she says, a little sheepishly. 

He shrugs. “I never actually went to bed. I think I just fell asleep in front of the TV.”

“And sorry I gave you a panic attack,” she says, and she means it to be the more playful of the two apologies, but he seems to take it at face value. 

“It’s okay. As long as you know you can _ always _ come over.” 

Robin settles herself in the alcove of cushions in the middle of the sofa. She bats some of them aside to make it wide enough for the two of them, but Steve doesn’t join her in the sitting room until a minute or so later, two steaming mugs in his hands. 

“Cocoa, or… something powdery and brown,” he says, and puts them on the coffee table in front of her. 

She narrows her eyes at the timing, but doesn’t make him admit out loud that he’d started preparing comfort beverages before she’d even arrived. Gosh, he’s a sap. And she adores him. Two statements she would never ever _ ever _ have imagined herself acknowledging. 

“You wanna watch this?” he asks, gesturing to the late-night news roundup that’s probably following whatever sports game dragged on this late. 

“I don’t care,” she says, and tucks her knees up under her chin. 

Steve sits down next to her. The wall of cushions on every side gives Robin the impression of a cocoon, and she’s definitely not surprised he fell asleep here. 

“So,” she says, “Dish, then.” 

“Huh?”

She gives him a nudge. “Your _ date,_ dingus.”

“Oh, yeah… it was nice, I guess.”

“You guess?” Robin tuts. “I went to a lot of effort to get that date…” 

Steve grins. “I could have done it without you, Buckley, I was just throwing you a bone.”

She snorts at that. “Yeah, because you were doing so well at Scoops…”

“I told you… it was that stupid hat.” 

“With or without the hat, you were a joke. Still are a joke.” She gives a huge, dramatic sigh. “What _ happened _ to you? I’m serious. You used to have game. You used to have game enough that you could ignore a babe like Tammy Thompson…”

Steve’s turn to snort. “A babe? We covered this… she’s a muppet.”

Robin purses her lips. “You’re saying muppets can’t be babes?”

“Does it have to be said? Wait, they have that new show. Muppet Babies. There you go, she’s a Muppet Babe-y...” 

Robin giggles through Steve’s rendition of Rainbow Connection, sung Tammy-style but squeakier. “You’re so mean,” she says at the end, though she’s still laughing. “But really,” she continues, composing herself, “That Carly girl. Nothing doing?” 

Steve considers. “She was fine. It, the date was fine. I just…” he leans forward to get his mug, and brings hers back too. “I dunno. I think when it comes to it, I just nosedive on purpose, because… it’s weird. The thought of having a girlfriend who I can’t… who doesn’t know….” He looks as though he’d be waving his hand vaguely in the air if it was free, and as it is Robin fears being scalded by the sloshing liquid as his mug veers towards her. “Stuff,” he finishes grandly. 

“Hmmm.” Robin hadn’t really thought about it in that much depth - her prospects are fewer and further between and mostly occupy the realms of daydream - but it is weird, now he points it out, would certainly be weird to date someone who’s so obviously on edge half the time and can’t explain why, or else spouts insane stories about monsters and possession and gateways to other dimensions. And who spends so much of their time carting around a troupe of fourteen-year-olds, despite not having dated any of their sisters within a year. Even in the short time since she’s been in this… club, she’s drawn a mental line between the people who Get It (Steve, the kids, Nancy, Jonathan and Joyce) and the people who Don’t And Never Will (the rest of Hawkins, the rest of the world). She’s never particularly applied it to dating, but again… dating is kind of a fairytale, for all Steve’s so desperate to return the favour of wingman. 

“So,” says Steve mischievously, “I bet you feel bad now.”

And to be honest, she kind of does, though not for the reason he’s assuming. She thinks back to how stricken he’d looked when he answered the door, how he’d immediately assumed she was in danger or distress based on a couple of poorly-chosen phrases over the phone. Steve is never far away from going on Red Alert. Granted, maybe in his mind she’s more at risk than most, given the whole gay thing, but if it wasn’t for the monsters and all, she’s sure he wouldn’t be so quick to assume the worst. There are a scary number of things that fall under the category ‘the worst’ that most people don’t even know exist, so no wonder his threshold is low. 

“It makes sense now,” she says wryly, “Why you waited until after I was initiated into this whole mess, to tell me you liked me.”

“Hah,” he says. He sips, thoughtfully. “I don’t think I was really thinking about the timeline, but. It’s kind of a good point. The last time anybody tried to date someone outside the circle, he got eaten.”

“What?!”

“Joyce was dating this guy, last year. Bob. And he...” He trails off. “Yeah.” 

“Whoa, Steve, that’s like…” She shakes her head. “That’s like, not something you just pepper into a conversation.”

“Sorry.”

“Also, you forgot Dustin. He’s dating an ‘outsider’.”

“Oh, yeah. Alright, don’t tell him I forgot that. But Suzie lives in Nevada.”

“Utah,” she corrects him. “God, Steve, whose daughter-in-law is she?”

“Both of ours. And Utah is still pretty far. She’s not going to run into anything over there.”

“Maybe they have their own gates,” Robin suggests, taking a sip of the cocoa-or-something-powdery-and-brown. It’s good. 

“Maybe. But my point stands.” 

“Yeah, okay.” Robin gives another melodramatic sigh.

“What?”

“Not only do I have to find a girl who likes girls, I have to find a girl who likes girls _ and monster-hunting._ How many of those can there be? Statistical nightmare.”

“There’s gotta be at least one.” 

“It’s just so inconvenient.” Of all the reasons she’s ever wished she could be ‘normal’, this is by far the most outlandish, and therefore the most fun to rail about. 

Steve says something into his mug that’s so quiet she can’t make out the words, which means she probably wasn’t meant to, which means she _ has _to know what it was. 

“What was that, Harrington?”

“Nothing. Just thinking out loud.” 

“Thinking what?”

“Nothing.”

“Come onnnnn.”

“No.” He shifts. “It’s stupid.” 

“So what? Doesn’t usually stop you.”

He turns to look at her then, and instead of pretending to be wounded or clueless he just looks kind of… fond, which looks better on him than a smirk but makes her feel distinctly like Dustin, or Will, or (very occasionally) Erica. 

“What?”

He grins, self-conscious. “What I said was, it’s not inconvenient for me.” 

She frowns and has to relocate the thread of conversation. “Me liking girls? Dude, I’m cutting your pool in half.”

She isn’t, obviously, God if only that were true, but she bats that thought aside when he says,

“I just mean it’s safer.” 

“What?” She feels her eyes practically pop out of her head. “What… Steve, what happened to you, really? Like, is there… did Nancy..?”

It’s his turn to be horrified. “What? No, no, no, nothing like that. I just mean, safer, like…. I can never fall in love with you, and you can _ never _ fall in love with me, and neither of us ever even have to wonder about it. Or we never have to worry that some stupid drunken kiss is going to make everything... stupid and complicated. Or if one of us does find somebody else it doesn’t have to change anything and we never have to drift apart like people do.” He sets down his mug. “So it means I get to keep you forever.”

Robin lets that sink in, or tries to. After a few seconds her natural inclination to tease him has her repeating, “Ew, _ forever_?” but his total lack of response to her tone ruins it completely. 

“Yep. Forever.” 

“Should I… make room on my wrist for a BFFs bracelet?” she says, another faint attempt.

This time he bites. “No. You’re good, but you’re not _ Dustin._”

She laughs, and he laughs, and the reality of the thing, the fact that he’s just told her he wants to never ever not be friends with her ever, is pretty much the best thing she knows right now. And the phrasing might be a little strange, but she can’t even find fault with that, because it could sound creepy in another context but it occurs to Robin that actually... yeah. She does want to be kept. She doesn’t want to be this transient streak through everyone’s history that they look back on and say, ‘Remember when we used to hang around with that girl - what was her name? Robin?’. She doesn’t want to be a some exotic flavour of a bygone month people point to when they want to prove they’re not a bigot.

She doesn’t want to be a_ phase._

And she wishes she didn’t have to hear that word in her mother’s pinched-up tone, but that’s how it feels, that word, like everything she is and wants is temporary and therefore unimportant. She doesn’t want to be just passing through, not always. It would be nice to be… to be kept. And there are lots of ways of being kept. That reminds her of something she’s heard, quite recently. She can’t put her finger on it at first. 

“Love must be multi-form, else it is just tyranny,” she mutters, and then immediately remembers where she heard it. “Damn it, DH Lawrence.” 

“What’s that? Are you saying you love me, Buckley?” 

“I mean, technically I’m saying _ you _ love _ me_.”

“Well, then technically, you’re right.” 

“Good. And it’s mutual.” 

“It’s what?”

“Mu– you _ know _ what mutual means.” 

“Maybe I don’t.”

She pokes him in the ribs. “You’re just playing dumb because you want me to say it.”

“Say what?” 

She has to hand it to him, he’s really good at this dumbass act, which would make her wonder if it’s been an act all along, only nobody would pretend to be as demonstrably dumb as she’s known him to be. 

Anyway, she’s not insusceptible. “I love you, you _ dingus_.” 

He looks at her with a satisfaction that might be infuriating, on any other night. “Love you, too.” 

And she settles back against the pillows and against him and her mug is warm in her hand and her heart is warm in her chest, and somewhere out there there’s a monster-hunting girl with the world in her eyes, but right here, right now, it’s her and Steve, and that’s… completely fine by Robin. 


End file.
